It’s no secret that Stephen King passionately hates Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining. As much as I love the film, Kubrick really did take a lot of liberties in changing the story and making it his own.
I’m a huge fan of both the movie and the book, and I like each one for what they are. But King thinks Kubrick completely missed the mark. In an interview with Deadline, King reveals his biggest problem with the film, and it involved the main character, Jake Torrance.
“The character of Jack Torrance has no arc in that movie. Absolutely no arc at all. When we first see Jack Nicholson, he’s in the office of Mr. Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know, then, he’s crazy as a shit house rat. All he does is get crazier. In the book, he’s a guy who’s struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that’s a tragedy. In the movie, there’s no tragedy because there’s no real change.”
King is right. You can’t argue with that, and I agree with him on that issue. The author goes on to share an experience talking with Kubrick about the story before he made the movie:
“I talked to Stanley on the phone before he started and I remember I could feel him reaching, trying to find his way into the books, and he said, ‘Well, don’t you find that all ghost stories are optimistic, don’t you think so? Because it means that the presupposition is that if there are ghosts, there’s an afterlife, we don’t just die, we go on.’ And I said, ‘Mr. Kubrick, what about hell?’ There was a long pause at the other end and he said in a very stiff voice, I don’t believe in hell.’ And I said, ‘Well, OK, you don’t, but my feeling is that if there are ghosts, they’re as likely to be maligned as they are to be ‘come into the light.’ You remember the movie with Patrick Swayze, Ghost? There was a feeling there that ghosts are really kind of on our side, but it’s just as likely that the experience of dying has driven some of them mad.”
He goes on to admit that The Shining was a beautifully shot film, but explains that there’s no substance to it, saying:
“I think The Shining is a beautiful film and it looks terrific and as I’ve said before, it’s like a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it. In that sense, when it opened, a lot of the reviews weren’t very favorable and I was one of those reviewers. I kept my mouth shut at the time, but I didn’t care for it much.”
I personally appreciate each artist's vision of the story, they are both effective in what they do, but if I had to choose one being better than the other, I would have to go with King’s book. What do you think about King’s comments? If you had to choose one over the other which would it be?
